Question

I have the following in a shell Perl script:

my @LS  = `ls -1t /logs/log.csv.*`;
foreach my $line (@LS) {

This works fine if there actually is one or more log.csv.* files.

But if no log file exists I get the error:
ls: cannot access…

Can I somehow suppress this warning as the shell script is a cron script and it is OK if there are no files?

Answer 1

Do it all in Perl, including reverse sort by last modified timestamp:

In this example I also made it so it does “stat” on each file only once.

my @LS = glob('/logs/log.csv.*');

my @mtimes = map { (stat)[9] } @LS;

my @sorted_indexes = sort { $mtimes[$b] <=> $mtimes[$a] } 0 .. $#mtimes;

foreach my $line ( @LS[ @sorted_indexes ] ) {
    ...
}